


The Order of Things

by awriterthatwrites



Category: Sleepy Hollow (TV)
Genre: Creation Myth, F/M, Folklore, Original Mythology, Porn with Feelings, Sumerian, Underworld
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-09
Updated: 2015-12-09
Packaged: 2018-05-05 18:10:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,592
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5385485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/awriterthatwrites/pseuds/awriterthatwrites
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is the order of things. This is their way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Order of Things

**Author's Note:**

> Based on the creation myth of the Sumerian goddess Inanna, who tricked Enki, the God of Knowledge, into giving her humanity's treasures. Original text can be found here: http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcsl.cgi?text=t.1.3.1#
> 
> Added in a present-day epilogue that explains how it all comes full circle.

The first night, Crane falls onto her bed, belly afire with gin.

He rests upon sheets not yet folded - what would seem a mid-act chore between shows on Netflix - and closes his eyes.

Immersed in the scent, he is fooled for a moment into thinking they’re still in the routine of things. That the Leftenant has abandoned the latest round of laundry to answer the door; that she will call up to him, in that lilting tone, announcing their delicacies from the Far East have arrived, and that his ass better get down here before it gets cold.

 _A farce_ , he laments. _A simpleton’s delusion_.  

He dreams.

She comes to him, draped languidly beneath the yawning stretch of a cold, white tree, serene amid a forest blanketed by shadow. Everything is cold down here. Lifeless in a way that sends a shudder through his thick coat — _when did he on put his coat_? — the sky drained of color.

A hand reaches up, metal rings dragging along his pallid skin. Somehow, he knows that within each one lie the blueprints of civilizations. Her eyes bore into him, discerning. Assessing. 

“Inanna.” The word tumbles from him, dark and certain.

And with his recognition, the realm shifts, no longer dreary and foreboding. Instead, he understands it for what it truly is: a shadow of the non-real; the darkened void where things gestate before they are birthed into being.

He pulls her to him. Words excessive in a place that thrives on shadows. He digs into her, nestling into the very heart that beats — a strange, dulled rhythm — and yet still beats. For him, for them.

Her eyes bear a weight he’s not seen in her earthly incarnation. She is much more here than she was there. She is war-bringer, hearth-eater, justice-wielder. Destroyer. Above all these things, she is ruler of his heart.

“Enki.” Her mouth falls softly around the syllables, a mixture of wonder and despair. He should not be here. _How_ is he here?

Her fingers on his cheek loosen the reins of memory, blasting open doors he knew not existed in his mind. He remembers that he is so much more here than he was there. He is water-bringer, earth-giver, knowledge-haver. Destroyer. Above all things, he is the keeper of her heart.

He falls to her mouth, eager to devour her breath.

In a far-off place, he dimly recalls their difference. Their heights, their colors, their tones. She bears an antiquated name for the modern day. His is even worse. But they still retain a semblance of their fuller selves, the spark within them impossible to extinguish — a spark that has existed since light itself first touched the firmament; a spark cast forth from the very embers of Prometheus’s flame.

It scorches through him, this fire. Burns through the worries of the man, leaving behind something larger, fuller. Something he reaches into the expanse of the void to call up from within. It lets him fall into her vastness, into the very breadth of the sky.

His mouth invades, seeking, claiming. She opens willingly, allowing him this small victory. He knows she is not here of her own volition. His Inanna, the war-bringer, hearth-eater: her time has not yet come to reclaim her position in this place. Neither, for that matter, has his.  And yet, here they are: her hands upon him, fingers weaving into his skin, molding, seeking, claiming.

He presses her down, into the earth. She presses back. A moment to relish the way her hot skin dances beneath the pads of his fingers, and then she opens beneath him, head thrown back in a keening cry as he sinks down and in.

He thrusts deeply, a claim; a declaration. His hands clamped around full hips that churn with a primeval rhythm. Her body is the haven he’s known for lifetimes — and hers, his, their roles reversed more than once in this strange dance across the aeons. He laughs at himself for having forgotten such a profound, closely-knit thing, that they are cloven parts of the same whole; one over-soul split into two, merely experiencing itself through their difference.

He rolls and grinds her deep into the earth, each thrust pushing against the wall of memory in her mind. It’s not possible that she knows this — how he moves, how he sounds, how he feels inside her — and yet her body rises up underneath him in a tempo familiar as breath. She knows before he moves what the action will be; hooking her legs around his hips, swirling hard against her, a hand pulling her up to meet him as he sinks deep within.

“Enki,” she whispers. A plea, a question. She can only dig into his back, words whispered along his skin as she begs him to shatter her. Harder, faster, with a violence that becomes them in this tempestuous void of time-space; here, where they are allowed to combust against and within one another like lava melting rock; like water battering the mountainside.

She feels him swell within her, his breaths ragged, muscles taut. “Inanna,” he murmurs, hitching her legs higher, angling himself deeper. One hand on his chest, pushing against him even as she opens her thighs wide to welcome the inevitability of their thunderous end.

He swells and shoves himself deeply as he presses her name into her skin. Her objections smothered by his mouth on hers, swallowing her cries, her protests. Hips tilting up with practiced patience as he throbs and pulses, spilling within her, holding her taut against him so that every stroke drives deep, down to her very core.

He hastens her release in that maddening way, allowing her not a moment’s breath before he’s surging within her once again, hips pistoning hard and fast as he feels himself swell once more; allows the pressure to crest and break as she collapses around him, drawing him in deeper, convulsing as she cries out, the blood she draws a punishment for the payment he always exacts.

There is heat and the leaden weight of knowing as he fills her; resigned satisfaction as they both come down, breathing hard against each other.

“Give them to me,” he says, pressing a kiss upon her collarbone.

She traces his back, his face. “No,” she replies, hand drifting to her abdomen that even now grows, swelling to accommodate what they have created.

When he withdraws and lifts her from the earth, flowers blossom where they once lay. And when they walk, each step of hers leaves a patch of green, her thighs slick with the remnants of their joining that sloughs off, down into the earth to sow life.

Later, she will prop herself upon the ground and birth Kindness. From her thighs she will push out Wisdom. Even now, as they walk hand in hand, her belly gestates Attentiveness; Respect; The Rebel Lands, Deceit, and Fire.

She never knows which one she will birth; which treasure of humanity the great An wills. But whichever one it is, she will bring it forth. She must. For Enki had once foolishly given her all of these treasures when she had visited him in the the city of Abzu. She had plied them from him with poetry and drink, and refuses to return what is rightfully his.

Every time they join, he demands them back. Every time, she refuses. And so, they continue like this: earth and sky, land and river, knowledge and justice — surging towards each other, hearts clanging as they are compelled by a force larger than themselves, by an order that commands their carnal obedience.

She wonders sometimes — when the contractions grip her and she falls to the earth, helpless to do little but watch as instinct takes over — if it would not be more prudent to concede; to hand her lot to him and do away with this eternal, ceaseless chase. But then his mouth is at her ear, his hands molding across her swollen middle, and she remembers there is no other place she wishes to be.

Her hands fold over his. They breath in. Out. Another push. She closes her eyes, breathing against him. This is the order of things. This is their way.

***

It is only months later — after she's found, after they've loved, after promises are murmured to one another amid a small troupe of witnesses — that Crane recalls the dream.

He lies on his side, head tucked into her hair, fingers splayed over her bare middle. Pads brushing over taut skin that's barely begun to swell. She shifts against his touch, fingers twining and stilling his aimless caresses. 

"Is that why you resisted?"

Abbie pushes back, half-asleep. "Resisted what?"

A brush against her stomach. "This."

She turns, hands twining into the hair at his nape. He'd told her about his hallucinations in the time she'd been gone; visions birthed amid the aimless turns through piles of books, searching madly for archetypes, legends, myths — _anything_ to make sense of what she'd become, what fate had dealt her.

"You telling me it's the hangover from having been some Sumerian deity?" She presses against him, belly to chest. "Pretty sure last time I checked, it was your fear of college tuition and a lack of 401K that's kept us off the baby train, Crane."

He mutters something about her being as impossible then as she is now, and she tells him to shutup, and he lifts her absurdly thin negligee, and goes about the task of trying to once again persuade her into giving in.

 

 


End file.
